Peacemaking: an aspiration not an achievement

an interview with Alfred Hassler

Alfred Hassler (1910-1991) was one of the major figures in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In prison during World War II as a conscientious objector, he joined the FOR staff and went on to serve as editor of the Fellowship magazine and later as FOR executive secretary and general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was interviewed by Jim Forest and Diane Leonetti on the occasion of his retirement in 1974.

Al Hassler with grandson Daniel

Leonetti: Al, perhaps
you could start by trying to remember how you became a pacifist?

It was during the Depression. Everybody was aware of that war was coming. In the summer of 1939 I was teaching a course on Christianity and peace at a Baptist conference in Pennsylvania. The war was so imminent I recall telling the class that we might not ever see one another again.

Somewhere in that period, my thinking returned from antiwar
to pacifist. I can’t recall just when. It just evolved. I never read anything
that did it. No one converted me. It was no flash of light on the road to
Damascus. But suddenly I was a pacifist. And then I became president of the
Baptist Pacifist Fellowship before I even heard of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation.

Forest: Many people
think of themselves as post-World War II pacifists. They imagine that, had they
been of military age before Hiroshima, they might have been volunteers in the
war against Hitler. World War II, in their minds, was the last just war. Yet
you became a pacifist before the war and you remained a pacifist throughout.
Wasn’t that difficult?

Being a pacifist during World War II was difficult, and it has been ever since. Unquestionably the things that Hitler and the Nazis were doing were evil, unqualifiedly evil. It is still difficult to respond of the question, “What would you do about Hitler?”

But we pacifists were talking about the reasons World War II
would happen well before it began — out
of Versailles, out of all the inequities, out of the ringing of Germany with
steel by the Allies, out of the refusal of the Allies to live up to their
treaty agreements, out of the refusal to disarm — out of all that we saw a
national paranoia being created in Germany that inevitably would produce a
Hitler-like leader.

We didn’t know any way to prevent the war once Hitler was in
power. But the pragmatic evidence is that we pacifists saved more Jews from
Hitler than was saved by any army. Remember the Holocaust began after the war started. Jews were being
persecuted and driven out of the country. Their property was being taken. But
the mass murder didn’t begin until the war was underway. Even then pacifists in
Europe continued to be at the core of efforts to hide Jews and smuggle them to
safety.

The analysis that pacifists made about the factors driving
us toward war proved quite accurate, but we were powerless to put into effect
the recommendation which might have prevented war.

You know in some ways it was easier being a pacifist than
then it has been during the Vietnam War. In World War II we knew we were powerless. We never thought
we could end the war once it began. All we could do was argue for a war without
victory rather than the unconditional surrender the governments demanded. We
were supporting conscientious objectors. We were rescuing the victims of the
Nazis. In this country we were bringing in as many Jews as the government would
allow — which tragically weren’t very many. We were never under the delusion
that we have the political power to stop the war. But during the Vietnam War
the peace movement thought it did have that power, and people in it became
infinitely more frustrating.

Forest: Are you glad
you went to prison?

Sure. I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I’m glad they sent
me where they did. Conscientious objectors were mainly sent to Danbury or
Sandstone federal prisons. But I was appalled at the thought of being locked up
for years with a bunch of conscientious objectors! (laughter) So when they went
sent me to Lewisburg, a maximum-security prison with only thirty conscientious
injectors among a prison population of thirteen hundred, I was delighted as
well as a little frightened. But it was an experience I had practically lusted
after and I was very glad to go. I learned a great deal.

I was naïve about going to prison. You know my family were
all law-and-order people. They weren’t the kind that wanted to see cops attacking
people, but they took it for granted that no good person ever went to prison. It
was very contradictory because we were always going on about St. Paul and St.
Peter and all those early Christians who were always in prison. But not in the
United States! Their idea was, I think, that had Jesus been in America, he wouldn’t
have gone to prison and wouldn’t have been crucified.

Forest: You remind me
of a postcard message I received from Thich Nhat Hanh while I was in prison,
something very brief: “Do you remember the tangerine we ate when we were
together? Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more.” It gave me encouragement
and helped me approach prison in a nonconfrontational way — to take the
experience bite by bite.

And day by day.

I hadn’t thought about it before but one of the reasons for
wanting to be in a maximum-security prison rather than with a lot of
conscientious objectors was my own aversion to sitting around talking with
people who were doing time for the same reason. In a maximum-security prison,
where you are surrounded by conventional prisoners, you would findw a
conscientious objector out in the playing field surrounded by twenty or thirty
non-conscientious objectors just talking.

We got so involved in other people’s problems that we didn’t
have time to brood on our own problems. And that was a good thing.

Forest: What made you
decide to join the FOR staff after you left prison?

I decided I would work in the peace movement for five years
and then go back to advertising and journalism and make a good living from
family. But I never did.

What I really wanted to be was a writer. I didn’t want to be
a peace executive. There were times when I thought I was the only one in the on
the FOR staff who didn’t want to be
executive secretary. (laughter)

Leonetti: I was
wondering how the shape of the pacifist movement has changed since you’ve been
in it?

In some ways it hasn’t changed at all and other ways it is
changed drastically. Both bother me.

It hasn’t changed much in its individualism. We lack
discipline. We won’t focus our collective efforts are one or two or three
things at a time. Our members employ a few program people and support staff and
saddle them with the expectation that they can do twenty or thirty major
efforts and have some effect. Our efforts are too diffuse. There is a touching faith
on the part of our members that their staff can do anything — and an almost
reprehensible feeling on the staff’s part that they should do everything. There is, as yet, no sense of a coherent
program on which we pacifists can unite in the interest of accomplishing a few
things, even if not in the order each of us might privately prefer.

The other change in the peace movement is that there is now
a great deal more sophistication regarding the complexities that are involved
in the search for peace. We no longer assume history is made only in the United
States and Europe. We know, in fact, that it is more likely to be made in the
poverty-stricken countries which are the breeding ground of conflict. We know
that peace isn’t to be achieved with declarations and treaties — it runs much
deeper than that.

There is still a good many people who want simplified
answers, who went to find a magic button that will make everything okay again.
We get the feeling that if only we did the right thing, worked a little bit
harder, we would achieve what is needed.

There is more sophistication now, by and large — but more
despair as well.

Forest: What about the
FOR’s name? “Fellowship” seems to be an archaic religious term and “reconciliation”
an archaic political goal. If you could, would you change the FOR’s name, or
any part of it?

No, though I detested the name myself when I first joined
the staff. I came out of a religious setting in which “fellowship” was used as
a verb. There was always talk about “fellowshipping together.” For me it was like running your fingernails
down a blackboard. And “reconciliation” seemed a weak word. But the words don’t
bother me anymore. I’ve become very attached to them.

It seems to me the essence of the pacifist position is not
the refusal to kill or to be part of any army but the very positive concept of
a human society that is familial in nature. The human family. We are all interrelated. We humans are a fellowship.

And “reconciliation” has become, for me, very strong word.
It doesn’t mean tolerating justice or the status quo. It does mean finding a
common denominator between and among people of vastly different backgrounds and
natures and possessions and all the rest.

Forest: Perhaps
nothing has been more important than your work these past eight or ten years than
the Vietnamese Buddhists and the nonviolent movements that has come out of
their faith and suffering. I’ve heard you call yourself a “Baptist Buddhist.”
Do you mean it?

There are two things crucial to me about the Buddhists, or
perhaps I should say Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of Buddhism, which is
been my main source of learning. One is the rejection of an arbitrary claim to
knowledge of total truth.

I vividly recall what Thich Nhat Hanh said to a young woman
in Santa Barbara who asked him what it meant to seek the Buddha and what happens
when you find him. Nhat Hanh answered, “I am a Zen master — and, as you know,
Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the
Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But
I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth and the
only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already
found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, ‘kill’
it, and go on in the search for truth.”

This is quite different from the idea that many Christians
cling to — that they have a revealed truth, final and eternal, that you can’t
deviate from.

The thing about such Buddhists as Thich Nhat Hanh is their
openness to ideas and insights of other people, other faiths, whether
religious, political, or whatever. They don’t think they have a monopoly on
truth. It is this sort of openness that draws me. In the past they took things
from Confucianism and Taoism. They took what seemed good into their own faith,
as they are now taking things from Christianity.

Forest: Earlier you
mentioned that there is more sophistication in the peace movement now about the
complexity of the problems we face. You added that there is also more despair.
I know I sense this very much in this society. We know that certain things are wrong.
We know the consequences will be disastrous. We wish to resist. We want to help
form constructive alternatives. But we haven’t got the hope that makes response
and resistance possible.

I agree. I’m tempted to say it was always that way, but that’s
not adequate. When I was chairman of the housing cooperative in which we still live,
I used to say, “During the day I work at writing tracts about how atomic bombs
are about to destroy the world — and then I come home and talk with people
about thirty-year mortgages!”

The problem of despair, I think, hits Americans harder than
other people because we have been conditioned by two centuries of overcoming
physical obstacles and enriching ourselves in the process, never encountering
insoluble problems. Now we encounter problems that can’t be solved.

Our situation is vastly different from that of people in
Europe and Indochina, people who have experienced defeat upon defeat in recent
memory and have developed what some Europeans call a “theology of despair,” which
is just another way of saying a theology of the cross.

One FOR member in Europe used to say, “You Americans think
that the kingdom of God is coming on earth through your work. We know that it is not. We
have been through Hitler and the war.”

Personally, I can’t accept despair as some sort of basis.
Despair may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get so despairing about the
human prospect that you have no energy find solutions.

The reason there is so much despair, I think, is because of
our inability to find handles for the various problems we face — ways of
grabbing hold of the things in order to solve them. They’re so complex, so
interrelated, so massive. People don’t see much relevance in doing small things. Why set up a day care
center — or try to improve housing — or even have a child — if the world is about
to blow itself up? Each person has to find a personal solution to that

A.J. Muste used to say, “All the really great things in
history came as a surprise. Nobody predicted them.”

The grounds for hope are there but are terribly hard to see.

Do you remember FOR’s China campaign in 1954 and ’55? There’s
a story we haven’t told very often because it was told to us in great
confidence. But that was nearly twenty years ago.

There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged
people to send President Eisenhower small sacks of grain provided by the FOR with
a message, “If your enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.” The
surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface our project was an utter
failure. But then quite by accident we learned from someone on Eisenhower’s press
staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also
discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs
of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu
crisis. [Quemoy and Matsu, islands off the east coast of China still occupied
by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese forces after the 1949 civil war on the
mainland, were the site of a major confrontation between the Republic of China
and Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Republic of China.] At the third meeting the
president turn to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program
and asked, “How many of those grain bags have come in?” The answer was 45,000,
plus tens of thousands of letters. Eisenhower’s response was that if that many
Americans were trying to find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t the
time to bomb China. This proposal was vetoed.

Leonetti: And you
learn that only by pure chance?

Pure chance! That’s the point. You do something and seem to
fail —but in the process of failure you sometimes accomplish something else
quite unexpected, something of greater importance.

History is full of esoteric little groups that live by themselves
and, regardless of whatever happens outside, carry on with that particular
witness and commitment. Pacifist do that in one sense. FOR members are a minute
portion of the world’s population. We strengthen and reinforce each other as
best we can. But there’s another element to it. We really do have massive world
problems and by our very best judgment they can wipe out civilization and the
human race.

Perhaps this is exaggerated. They say others have said this
before all through history. I reply that particular civilizations have been
wiped out before, that ours is the first period in in history in which a global
civilization has existed as well as the means of global destruction. When this
civilization is wiped out, there won’t be another to take its place. Not on
this planet.

Now we have a handful of people motivated to go on working
despite hopelessness. But if we want to motivate a constituency large enough to
effect the things that are necessary, then there has to be hope there,
something to see and work toward, a belief that it can be achieved.

Forest: How do you
inspire that?

I wish I knew.

Forest: At the recent FOR
national conference in Wisconsin, you talked about the word “love” — a
discredited word to many people. How do you locate that word in the vocabulary
of peacemaking?

For a long time we tried to point out that there were
different kinds of love — agape, eros, etcetera — but that really doesn’t come
across to most people. When you talk about love, people think of a very
intimate sort of relationship, but that’s manifestly impossible with each of the
billions of people alive today — or even
the one person who is doing something extraordinary destructive in your view.

It seems to me that the three elements that are essential to
an understanding of love are compassion, humility and understanding. Compassion
in the sense of awareness, sensitivity and understanding of other persons and
their weaknesses, even the ones you think are very strong — their mortality,
their limitations, the fact that they suffer in ways we don’t know about or
understand — and humility in understanding just have narrow is the gap between
people we regard as morally good — ourselves! — and the people whom we regard
as morally bad — the ones who oppose us.

Milton Mayer has written about a Quaker meeting for worship at
which A.J. Muste stood up and said, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at
all.” This statement became almost an obsession with Milton as he dug deeper
and deeper into it. You can’t get anywhere with it unless you realize that love
means understanding and compassion — then it opens up. Compassion, not in the
sense of lessening your opposition to Hitler and what he is doing, but
compassion for a man who clearly had suffered terribly, who was terribly
distorted, who had so little real happiness and joy.

The equivalent for us would be to say, “If I can I love
Richard Nixon, I cannot love at all.”

Again, love means understanding and compassion. You only
have to look at one of the hundreds of recent pictures of Nixon to see the
suffering that he’s going through, a suffering that he probably doesn’t yet
understand — a man who doesn’t understand himself, his personality, or the
reaction of people to him; a man who really feels that he was right, that he is
being persecuted. You can only feel sorry for him. You can only feel compassion.

That’s the essence of pacifism for me. The realization that
we are, as it’s put in the New Testament, all sinners who have fallen short of
the glory of God. We have no right to be self-righteous, but only to be pitying,
compassionate, helpful.

Of course we fail at this all the time. Pacifism is an
aspiration, not an achievement. As one of the best pacifists I know — Cao Ngoc
Phuong — put it, when asked if she were a pacifist: “Not yet.”

* * *

Somewhere in that period, my thinking returned from antiwar
to pacifist. I can’t recall just when. It just evolved. I never read anything
that did it. No one converted me. It was no flash of light on the road to
Damascus. But suddenly I was a pacifist. And then I became president of the
Baptist Pacifist Fellowship before I even heard of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation.

Forest: Many people
think of themselves as post-World War II pacifists. They imagine that, had they
been of military age before Hiroshima, they might have been volunteers in the
war against Hitler. World War II, in their minds, was the last just war. Yet
you became a pacifist before the war and you remained a pacifist throughout.
Wasn’t that difficult?

Been a pacifist during World War II was difficult, and it
has been ever since. Unquestionably the things that Hitler and the Nazis were
doing were evil, unqualifiedly evil. It is still difficult to respond of the
question, “What would you do about Hitler?”

But we pacifists were talking about the reasons World War II
would happen well before it began. Out
of Versailles, out of all the inequities, out of the ringing of Germany with
steel by the Allies, out of the refusal of the Allies to live up to their
treaty agreements, out of the refusal to disarm — out of all that we saw a
national paranoia being created in Germany that inevitably would produce a
Hitler-like leader.

We didn’t know any way to prevent the war once Hitler was in
power. But the pragmatic evidence is that we pacifists saved more Jews from
Hitler than was saved by any army. Remember the Holocaust began after the war started. Jews were being
persecuted and driven out of the country. Their property was being taken. But
the mass murder didn’t begin until the war was underway. Even then pacifists in
Europe continued to be at the core of efforts to hide Jews and smuggle them to
safety.

The analysis that pacifists made about the factors driving
us toward war proved quite accurate, but we were powerless to put into effect
the recommendation which might have prevented war.

You know in some ways it was easier being a pacifist than
then it has been during the Vietnam War. In World War II we knew we were powerless. We never thought
we could end the war once it began. All we could do was argue for a war without
victory rather than the unconditional surrender the governments demanded. We
were supporting conscientious objectors. We were rescuing the victims of the
Nazis. In this country we were bringing in as many Jews as the government would
allow — which tragically weren’t very many. We were never under the delusion
that we have the political power to stop the war. But during the Vietnam War
the peace movement thought it did have that power, and people in it became
infinitely more frustrating.

Forest: Are you glad you went to prison?

Sure. I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I’m glad they sent
me where they did. Conscientious objectors were mainly sent to Danbury or
Sandstone federal prisons. But I was appalled at the thought of being locked up
for years with a bunch of conscientious objectors! (laughter) So when they went
sent me to Lewisburg, a maximum security prison with only 30 conscientious
injectors among a prison population of 1300, I was delighted as well as a
little frightened. But it was an experience I had practically lusted after and
I was very glad to go. I learned a great deal.

I was naïve about going to prison. You know my family were
all law-and-order people. They weren’t the kind that wanted to see cops attacking
people, but they took it for granted that no good person ever went to prison. It
was very contradictory because we were always going on about St. Paul in St.
Peter and all those early Christians who were always in prison. But not in the
United States! The idea was, I think, that had Jesus been in America, he wouldn’t
have gone to prison and wouldn’t have been crucified.

Forest: You remind me of a postcard message I received from Thich Nhat Hanh while I was in prison, something very brief: “Do you remember the tangerine we ate when we were together? Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more.” It helped me immensely to find some encouragement and approach prison in a nonconfrontational way — to take the experience bite by bite.

And day by day.

I hadn’t thought about it before but one of the reasons for
wanting to be in a maximum security prison rather than with a lot of
conscientious objectors was my own aversion to sitting around talking with
people doing time for the same reason. In a maximum security prison, where you
are surrounded by conventional defenders, you can see a conscientious objector out
in the playing field surrounded by 20 or 30 non-conscientious objectives just
talking.

We got so involved in other people’s problems that we didn’t
have time do brewed on our own problems. And that was a good thing.

Forest: What made you decide to join the FOR staff after you left prison?

I decided I would work in the peace movement for five years
and then go back to advertising and journalism and make a good living from
family. But I never did.

What I really wanted to be was a writer. I didn’t want to be
a peace executive. There were times when I thought I was the only one in the on
the FRO staff who didn’t want to be
executive secretary. (laughter)

Leonetti: I was
wondering how the shape of the pacifist movement has changed since you’ve been
in it?

In some ways it hasn’t changed at all, and other ways it is
changed drastically. Both bother me.

It hasn’t changed much in its individualism. We lack
discipline. We won’t focus our collective efforts are one or two or three
things at a time. Our members employ a few program people and support staff and
saddle them with the expectation that they can do 20 or 30 major efforts and
have some effect. Our efforts are too diffuse. There is a touching faith on the
part of our members that their staff can do anything — and an almost
reprehensible feeling on the staff’s part that they should do everything. There is, as yet, no sense of a coherent
program on which we pacifists can unite in the interest of accomplishing a few
things, even if not in the order each of us might privately prefer.

The other change in the peace movement is that there is now
a great deal more sophistication regarding the complexities that are involved
in the search for peace. We no longer assume history is made only in the United
States and Europe. We know, in fact, that it is more likely to be made in the
poverty-stricken countries which are the breeding ground of conflict. We know
that peace isn’t to be achieved with declarations and treaties — it runs much
deeper than that.

There is still a good many people who want simplified
answers, who went to find a magic button that will make everything okay again.
We get the feeling that if only we did the right thing, worked a little bit
harder, we would achieve what is needed.

There is more sophistication now, by and large — but more
despair as well.

Forest: What about the
FOR’s name? “Fellowship” seems to be an archaic religious term and “reconciliation”
an archaic political goal. If you could, would you change the FOR’s name, or
any part of it?

No, though I detested the name myself when I first joined
the staff. I came out of a religious setting in which “fellowship” was used as
a verb. There was always talk about “fellowshipping together.” For me it was like running your fingernails
down a blackboard. And “reconciliation” seemed a weak word. But the words don’t
bother me anymore. I’ve become very attached to them.

It seems to me the essence of the pacifist position is not
the refusal to kill or to be part of any army but the very positive concept of
a human society that is familial in nature. The human family. We are all interrelated. We humans are a fellowship.

And reconciliation has become, for me, very strong word. It
doesn’t mean tolerating justice or the status quo. It does mean finding a
common denominator between and among people of vastly different backgrounds and
natures and possessions and all the rest.

Forest: Perhaps
nothing has been more important than your work these past eight or ten years than
the Vietnamese Buddhists and the nonviolent movements that has come out of
their faith and suffering. I’ve heard you call yourself a “Baptist Buddhist”
every now and then. Do you mean it?

There are two things crucial to me about the Buddhists, or
perhaps I should say Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of Buddhism, which is
been my main source of learning. One is the rejection of an arbitrary claim to
knowledge of total truth.

I vividly recall what Thich Nhat Hanh said to a young woman
in Santa Barbara who asked him what it meant to seek the Buddha and what happens
when you find him. Nhat Hanh answered, “I am a Zen master — and, as you know,
Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the
Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But
I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth and the
only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already
found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, ‘kill’
it, and go on in the search for truth.”

This is quite different from the idea that many Christians
cling to — that they have a revealed truth, final and eternal, that you can’t
deviate from.

The thing about such Buddhists as Thich Nhat Hanh is their
openness to ideas and insights of other people, other faiths, whether
religious, political, or whatever. They don’t think they have a monopoly on
truth.

It is this sort of openness that draws me. In the past they
took things from Confucianism and Taoism. They took what seemed good into their
own faith, as they are now taking things from Christianity.

Forest: Earlier you
mentioned that there is more sophistication in the peace movement now about the
complexity of the problems we face. You added that there is also more despair.
I know I sense this very much in this society. We know that certain things are wrong.
We know the consequences will be disastrous. We wish to resist. We want to help
form constructive alternatives. But we haven’t got the hope that makes response
and resistance possible.

I agree. I’m tempted to say it was always that way, but that’s
not adequate. When I was chairman of the housing cooperative in which we still live,
how used to say, “During the day I work at writing tracts about how atomic
bombs are about to in the world — and then I come home and talk with people
about thirty-year mortgages!”

The problem of despair, I think, hits Americans harder than
other people because we have been conditioned by two centuries of overcoming
physical obstacles and enriching ourselves in the process, never encountering
insoluble problems. Now we encounter problems that can’t be solved.

Our situation is vastly different from that of people in
Europe and Indochina, people who have experienced defeat upon defeat in recent
memory and have developed what some Europeans call a “theology of despair,” which
is just another way of saying a theology of the cross.

One FOR member in Europe used to say, “You Americans think
that the kingdom of God is coming on earth through your work. We know that it is not.
Have been through Hitler and the war.”

Personally, I can’t accept despair as some sort of basis.
Despair may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get so despairing about the
human prospect that you have no energy find solutions.

The reason there is so much despair, I think, is because of
our inability to find handles for the various problems we face — ways of
grabbing hold of the things in order to solve them. They’re so complex, so
interrelated, so massive. People don’t see much relevance in doing small things.

Why set up a day care center — or try to improve housing — or
even have a child — if the world is about to blow itself up?

Each person has to find a personal solution to that

A.J. Muste used to say, “All the really great things in
history came as a surprise. Nobody predicted them.”

The grounds for hope are there but are terribly hard to see.

Do you remember FOR’s China campaign in 1954 and ’55? There’s
a story we haven’t told very often because it was told to us in great
confidence. But that was nearly twenty years ago.

There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged
people to send Pres. Eisenhower small sacks of grain provided by the FOR with a
message, “If your enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.” The
surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface the project was an utter
failure.

But then quite by accident we learned from someone staff on
Eisenhower’s press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate
cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in
response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. [Quemoy and Matsu, islands off the east
coast of China still occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese forces
after the 1949 civil war on the mainland, were the site of a major
confrontation between the Republic of China and Mao Tse-tung’s People’s
Republic of China.] At the third meeting the president turn to a cabinet member
responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, “How many people do those
grain bags had come in?” The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of
letters. Eisenhower’s response was that if that many Americans were trying to
find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t the time to bomb China. This
proposal was vetoed.

Leonetti: And you learn that only by pure chance?

Pure chance! That’s the point. You do something and seem to
fail —but in the process of failure you sometimes accomplish something else
quite unexpected, something of greater importance.

History is full of esoteric little groups that live by themselves
and, regardless of whatever happens outside, carry on with that particular
witness and commitment. Pacifist do that in one sense. FOR members are a minute
portion of the world’s population, and we strengthen and reinforce each other as
best we can. But there’s another element to it. We really do have massive world
problems and by our very best judgment they can wipe out civilization and the
human race.

Perhaps this is exaggerated. They say others have said this
before all through history. I reply that particular civilizations have been
wiped out before, that ours is the first period in in history in which a global
civilization has existed as well as the means of global destruction. When this
civilization is wiped out, there won’t be another to take its place. Not on
this planet.

Now we have a handful of people motivated to go on working
despite hopelessness. But if we want to motivate a constituency large enough to
affect the things that are necessary, then there has to be hope there,
something to see and work toward, a belief that it can be achieved.

Forest: How do you inspire that?

I wish I knew.

Forest: At the recent FOR national conference in Wisconsin, you talked about the word “love” — a discredited word to many people. How do you locate that word in the vocabulary of peacemaking?

For a long time we tried to point out that there were
different kinds of love — agape, eros, etc. — but that really doesn’t come
across to most people. When you talk about love, people think of a very
intimate sort of relationship, but that’s manifestly impossible with each of the
billions of people alive today — or even
the one person who doing something extraordinary destructive in your view.

It seems to me that the three elements that are essential to an understanding of love, as we talk about it, are compassion, humility and understanding. Compassion in the sense of awareness, sensitivity and understanding of other persons and their weaknesses, even the ones you think are very strong. Their mortality, their limitations — the fact that they suffer in ways we don’t know about or understand. And humility in understanding just how narrow is the gap between people we regard as morally good — ourselves! — and the people whom we regard as morally bad — the ones who oppose us.

Milton Mayer has written about a Quaker meeting for worship in
which A.J. Muste stood up and said, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at
all.” This statement became almost an obsession with Milton as he dug deeper
and deeper into it.

You can’t get anywhere with it unless you realize that love
means understanding and compassion — then it opens up. Compassion, not in the
sense of lessening your opposition to Hitler and what he is doing, but
compassion for a man who clearly had suffered terribly, who was terribly
distorted, who had so little real happiness and joy.

The equivalent for us would be to say, “If I can I love
Richard Nixon, I cannot love at all.”

Again, love means understanding and compassion. You only have to look at one
of the hundreds of recent pictures of the man to see the suffering that he’s going
through, a suffering that he probably doesn’t yet understand — a man who doesn’t
understand himself, his personality, or the reaction of people to him; a man
who really feels that he was right, that he is being persecuted. You can only
feel sorry for him. You can only feel compassion.

That’s the essence of pacifism for me. The realization that
we are, as it’s put in the New Testament, all sinners who have fallen short of
the glory of God. We have no right to be self-righteous, but only to be pitying,
compassionate, helpful.

Of course we fail at this all the time. Pacifism is an
aspiration, not an achievement. As one of the best pacifists I know — Cao Ngoc
Phuong — put it, when asked if she were a pacifist: “Not yet.”

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Forest-Flier Editorial Servces

Jim Forest This book, now out-of-print, was published by Crossroads in 1990. “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.” […]

by Jim Forest The book was published by Crossroads in 1988 and is now out-of-print. to my Mother, Marguerite Hendrickson Forest “Lord, how good everything is… You only have to look around you!”— Maxim Gorky’s Grandmother, My Childhood Preface A decade before his death, Thomas Merton noted in his journal the realization that reconciliation is […]

published simultaneously in January 1982 by IFOR Report and Sojourners magazine By Jim Forest and Peter Herby “May I infect you a disease?” Thousands of Londoners have been receiving postcards with this alarming proposal from their Dutch neighbors across the North Sea. Instead of wooden shoes and windmills, the picture side of the card depicts […]

One of the important events of my life was receiving, while imprisoned for an anti-war protest, an original print of a NASA photograph of the Earth taken on the 16th of July 1969. It arrived shortly after the safe return of the Apollo 11 crew following their successful moon landing. This stunning image immediately became […]